Natural selection continues (in the Viking world)
Nature has published a new Viking genomics paper. This morning I didn’t even bother to check it out, as I had other things going on, and there’s been so much ancient DNA from Scandinavia that my thought was “what else could we learn?” Well, it turns out I should have checked it out. The sample […]
Natural selection continues down to the present in Estonia
One of the dynamics which is always operative in evolutionary biology is adaptation through natural selection. We know that it happens in humans, and it is clear that it has happened in the past and is happening in the present. It’s most obvious when it comes to disease. You can see the spread of malaria […]
Selection for rs3827760 at EDAR (“shovel-shaped” incisor SNP) during Holocene around the “Ring of Fire”
If you have been reading my blog will you be familiar with the SNP rs3827760 within the EDAR gene. This mutation has high derived frequencies in East Asians and is associated with a suite of physical characteristics. Most famously, the thickness of hair shaft and “shovel-shaped” incisors (a phenotype also found in Neanderthals). So the […]
No one understands the targets of selection in humans (except disease)
I’m proposing on an upcoming episode of The Insight that we should talk about natural selection in the context of humans. The reason is that there seems to be a lot of it. It may even be ubiquitous. But, in most cases which aren’t trivial, we have no good idea what’s going on. By not […]
Natural selection in humans (OK, 375,000 British people)
The above figure is from Evidence of directional and stabilizing selection in contemporary humans. I’ll be entirely honest with you: I don’t read every UK Biobank paper, but I do read those where Peter Visscher is a co-author. It’s in PNAS, and a draft which is not open access. But it’s a pretty interesting […]
Selection for pigmentation in Khoisan?
In the recent paper, Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure, there was a section natural selection. Since my post on the paper was already very long I didn’t address this dynamic. But now I want to highlight this section: The functional category that displays the most extreme allele frequency differentiation between present day San and ancient […]
How Chinese genetics is like Chinese food
Representatives of Szechuan and Shangdong cuisine
The Pith: The Han Chinese are genetically diverse, due to geographic scale of range, hybridization with other populations, and possibly local adaptation.
In the USA we often speak of “Chinese fo…
“What if you’re wrong” – haplogroup J
Back when this sort of thing was cutting edge mtDNA haplogroup J was a pretty big deal. This was the haplogroup often associated with the demic diffusion of Middle Eastern farmers into Europe. This was the “Jasmine” clade in Seven Daughters…
Convergent evolution happens!
In the image to the left you see three human males. You can generate three pairings of these individuals. When comparing these pairs which would you presume are more closely related than the other pairs? Now let me give you some more information. The r…
The evolutionary effect of the sky gods
Last week I reviewed ideas about the effect of “exogenous shocks” to an ecosystem of creatures, and how it might reshape their evolutionary trajectory. These sorts of issues are well known in their generality. They have implications from th…
Body odor, Asians, and earwax
When I was in college I would sometimes have late night conversations with the guys in my dorm, and the discussion would random-walk in very strange directions. During one of these quasi-salons a friend whose parents were from Korea expressed some surprise and disgust at the idea of wet earwax. It turns out he had […]
Chosen genes of the Chosen People
Last spring two very thorough papers came out which surveyed the genetic landscape of the Jewish people (my posts, Genetics & the Jews it’s still complicated, Genetics & the Jews). The novelty of the results was due to the fact that the research groups actually looked across the very diverse populations of the Diaspora, from […]
Disease as a byproduct of adaptation
How we perceive nature and describe its shape are a matter of values and preferences. Nature does not take notice of our distinctions; they exist only as instruments which aid in our comprehension. I’ve brought this up in relation to issues such as categorization of recessive vs. dominant traits. The offspring of people of […]